↓ Skip to main content
Chengyu Wang
  1. Blog/

Fixing an Ollama Install Failure Caused by a Snap-Installed curl

·1 min
Blog Ollama Ubuntu Troubleshooting
Author
Chengyu
I’m Chengyu — a final-year Computer Science student at the University of Sydney. I write about the things I build and break, plus hiking, travel, gaming, and gadgets.
Table of Contents

The problem
#

Running Ollama’s official install script failed with curl not found. Following Ubuntu’s suggestion, I installed curl via snap. After that, re-running the Ollama installer failed again — this time with a “directory does not exist” error, and the install wouldn’t complete.

The fix
#

Don’t install curl via snap. Once snap’s version of curl is on the PATH, reinstall curl properly instead:

  1. Update the package list:
    sudo apt update
  2. Install curl via apt:
    sudo apt install curl
    This is the right way to do it — apt is Ubuntu’s default package manager.
  3. Verify the install:
    curl --version
    This should print the installed curl version.

To make sure the /usr/bin version of curl takes priority, edit ~/.bashrc and reload it:

  1. Edit ~/.bashrc:
    nano ~/.bashrc
  2. Add this PATH setting at the end of the file:
    export PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/local/cuda-12.4/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin
  3. Save and exit.
  4. Reload it:
    source ~/.bashrc

That resolved the curl-related install failure — from there, the official Ollama installer ran through cleanly.

Related